Why It’s So Hard to Set - and Keep - Healthy Boundaries with Rick Hanson

I offer these every week along with a guided meditation. Just click the subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording. Or, if you'd like to join us live, which would be great, just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free. I'll make a brief comment about the meditation. You may have heard me make a similar comment. Some forms of meditation involve what could be called choiceless awareness, or open awareness, or open monitoring, in other words, in which we establish a basic sense of presence and then simply let go, and let go, and let go. Beautiful, fundamental kind of meditation. I think I'm going to lead you in one of those next week. There's another kind of meditation that's also very common, in which we become absorbed in some object of attention. It could be the sensations of breathing, it could also be states of being, such as getting absorbed in feelings of compassion, or a sense of calm strength, or a sense of your own innate goodness. Both forms of meditation are wonderful. I tend to use this setting as an opportunity, based in the science of positive neuroplasticity, to gradually reinforce and strengthen certain wholesome traits of being that begin with certain states of being that get internalized. There's a traditional saying, your mind takes its shape from what it repeatedly rests upon. Your brain, with repetition, takes its shape, literally, in terms of physical processes and structures. It takes its shape from what you rest your attention on over time. So if you rest your attention on what draws your heart, that becomes increasingly the inclination of your own being. Beautiful. It's not the only way to meditate, but it's a way to meditate, and that's what I tend to emphasize here. It can also be a little harder to become absorbed in wholesome states of being, because what routinely comes up is the opposite of that wholesome state of being. So here I am talking about your innate goodness, and what might be coming up for you is, well, yes, but, or what about. Very understandable. And when that happens, it's worth observing what else bubbles up in your awareness and what could be connected in neural networks to what you're trying to focus on. Be aware of that, bow in its direction if you like, and then as you can, come back to where you want to rest your mind, which is to say, come back to what you want to cultivate in your heart. And with time, it will become increasingly gravitational, and it will be increasingly your own inclination, and you'll stabilize in these wholesome qualities increasingly, and you'll return to them more rapidly, when inevitably in life, as I still do, I get jiggled away from them. You'll be able to come home more rapidly and more fully, increasingly over time. So I'm talking last week and now this week about the topic of boundaries, and I want to enter into this topic and explore it in a way that I've never heard anyone approach that is particularly drawing upon the teachings of the Buddha, particularly in his original teachings in early Buddhism. And see what you think about all this. So to begin with, we have the Buddha's own story, as best we can gather, that he lived around 2,500 years ago. He was born into wealth and privilege, including as a male, in his time. And then as a young adult, probably sometime in his 20s, married with a child on the way or recently delivered, he walked away from it all. He went forth into homelessness. And very often when people, well-meaning people included, talk about boundaries, they don't take into account privilege. They don't take into account the ways that it's easier for various people who belong to certain categories in societies to establish boundaries, and a lot harder for other people to establish boundaries, just by their position in those societies. And then also if you think about the accumulating internalization of a person's positioning in societies, that can create understandable changes in neural structure and function, changes in your body that then you carry with you into the next situation with someone who wants you to do something you don't really want to do, or is treating you in a way that they would not dare to treat another person who did not look like you. Privilege is really important. The Buddha had privilege. I sometimes wonder, what would the Dharma be like? What would we be doing today if the Buddha's wife, if Siddhartha's wife had walked away, handed him the child, the son, whose name was Rahula, which translates to fetter, Rahula, and said, you got Rahula, I'm out of here. You deal with him. And she then went forth into homelessness, found an awakening, and founded a teaching and a tradition that we're in the middle of now, 2,500 or so years later. Whoa! I mean, truth is truth, but the expression of the truth and the experiential practices that draw us more and more deeply into the way it actually is, which is the deep meaning of the word Dharma, you know, those are very shaped by different kinds of people. And I think in many ways Buddhism would have benefited if the Buddha had been a she rather than a he. In any case, here we are today, and we have in the Buddha's own life story the impact of privilege. The Buddha could differentiate. The Buddha could set a boundary, said, I'm not taking care of this kid. It's on you. And the Buddha lived in a time in which he knew that other people would rally around that child, and later on in life, he made his peace. I don't know if others made their peace with him, like, what, you left me with this kid? But we don't really hear that side of it. Anyway, so I just want to flag privilege as context. It's really important to take into account. And in my view, there are three factors that lead in life to privilege, more or less, and they're really different from each other. One factor is just luck, good or bad. If you have the genetic lottery of a lot of vitality in your body, you avoid certain kinds of illnesses or conditions that wear you down, if, for example, you have some abilities, if you're born with good looks, if you're relatively tall or whatever, if your body shape is valued in that culture, that's just luck. But it privileges you over time, compared to misfortune. So fortune, good or bad. Then we also have virtuous effort. Privilege can be earned. If I'm talking with people who've earned expertise, I privilege their point of view. I don't just agree with it blindly, but I give them the benefit of the doubt. So there can be earned positions in society. You earn knowledge, you earn a licensure, you earn standing. That confers a kind of privileging, if you will, among other benefits. Okay, virtuous effort. There's no moral hazard with fortune, good or bad, and certainly no moral hazard with virtuous effort, if anything. There's a moral benefit. And then we have this third factor of privilege, crucially important to understand, which is advantage. The Buddha was advantaged by virtue of being born into a wealthy class. He was advantaged by being male. He was advantaged. And advantage operates by benefiting some and harming others. Advantage is a tailwind for some and a headwind for others. And the gradual accumulation of advantage, or disadvantage, tends to statistically, if nothing else, lift some people up by holding others back. So that's a whole topic of consideration, including how one uses one's privilege, if one has it, particularly the extent to which one's privilege is a kind of ill-gotten gain through disadvantaging others. And that's a very, very deep topic and very relevant to setting boundaries. Who gets to set the boundaries? Who gets to decide who's in and who's out of a boundary that defines a group? Who gets to determine duties, what people owe each other? Very significant topic, including in settings, different people. And a major source of the underlying issue that many, many people have in setting and maintaining completely appropriate boundaries is the fact that they've been deprivileged over the course of their lifetime. And they don't feel they have the privilege. They don't feel they have the right to establish a boundary and hold fast to it. And that sense that they don't have the right is the result of others claiming those kind of rights for themselves. And so that's really worth looking at. When you look at your own internal difficulties in holding fast to your boundaries, to ask yourself, huh, to what extent have I internalized or to what extent have I understandably been swimming upstream and as a result not felt that I'm entitled to the kind of good treatment, the kind of respect, the kind of reciprocity that other people who are more privileged or more advantaged in society routinely presume for themselves? I think it's okay for me to tell you the story about my wife. My wife is really one of the absolute best holistic health practitioners I know. She's really technical and really solid and really, really good. She's not taking on any new clients. She's retiring. That boat has sailed. But anyway, she was talking with her daughter, who is a very strong person, and my wife was talking about how much she was charging per hour for her work and so forth. And our daughter just looked at her and just asked, Mom, how much would you be charging if you were a guy, if you were a man? And that was a real moment for Jan to just kind of look hard at, oh, what she felt entitled to in the give and take of market forces and so forth. So that's just an example of sometimes we internalize difficulties in standing up for our boundaries and asking for appropriate forms of reciprocity, appropriate exchanges of value that are roughly fair and even and okay over time because of this background of privilege or lack thereof. So in that context, then, I want to move on to another Buddha story, and this has to do with what are called the five reflections. And someone might be able to track that sutta. Sorry, I didn't have quite the time to do that. I think it's from the Anguttara something or other sutta, Nikaya. Anyway, point is, these are the five reflections. I'll do them kind of quickly because you may have heard them, but then I'm going to make a point. Five reflections are, is it given to me, so you're asking this question for yourself, is it given to me to avoid aging? And you bring a kind of don't know mind to each one of these questions, a fresh beginner's mind. Is it given to me to avoid illness? Is it given to me to avoid death? Is it given to me to avoid being separated one way or another, one day or another from all that I love? And is it given to me to avoid inheriting the results of my deliberate actions? Now I'm slightly updating and, you know, paraphrasing some of the traditional languaging, but I think those questions stand in their own right as I've expressed them here. And so, these are great reflections to look for ourselves. And in the Sutta, the Buddha talks about those who don't face these reflections and then those who do. Okay, the twist I want to put to this is to foreground the fact that these reflections apply to other people too. Other people both face illness, aging, and death, and separations inevitably, you know, given impermanence from all that they care about and love. And so we can have certainly compassion for them. And also, the fifth question, they too inherit the results of their actions. And that fundamental principle that your karmas, in the sense of results of actions, in this life at least, are your own, for better and for worse. And the results in the lives of others are their own, for better or worse. So we have this combination that's central to Buddhism of two truths side by side, of oneness and distinction, joining and differentiation, the ocean and the waves. And so inherent in these reflections is a compassionate recognition that other people are being affected by streams of causes and conditions that are not your own. And this goes to the sense that many people have of over-responsibility for what is happening in the minds of others, caregiving responsibilities, caretaking responsibilities, you know, also a sense of being overly to blame for what is happening in the minds of others. And also a kind of grandiosity about overestimating your capacity to influence what is going on in the minds of others. And sometimes the source of that, I'm using a loaded word, grandiosity or deliberately, comes from being a parentified child who was deeply involved in caregiving parents or others above and beyond what would be appropriate, really, for a child. So for example, speaking a little personally here, you know, I've come to realize looking back that in the context of her life as a young mother in the 1950s, in which my father was privileged and she was not in a variety of ways, there were ways in which my mother, my large-hearted and sweet mother, was pretty blue, you know. She didn't have a lot of extended family supporting her. She did not live in a village it takes to raise a child. She was kind of blue. And like a lot of kids who become a little parentified, I was empathic and, you know, caring and, you know, I felt a certain influence and it was in some ways gratifying to me to feel like I could cheer her up, be her confidant sometimes as I got older. And that could then lead to, as an adult, an excessive sense of your own influence, an unrealistic appraisal of your own influence over what is really happening in the minds of others. And with wisdom, over time, we can start to recognize, you know, the bad news and the good news is that there's almost nothing you can do. They're just gonna, gonna, you know. And when you realize that, it's like, grrr, and whew, what a release, you know. Because if you don't have power, you don't have responsibility. If you don't have power, you don't have moral culpability. You are not to blame. It's not your fault. And so that's coming from, given from, that's a natural conclusion from this teaching of the Buddha about the five reflections, that others are the inheritors of the streams running through their lives, both the results of deliberate action and the fact that there's so many forces affecting other people upstream that aren't, you're not the cause of. And you also have very little power to change. That's worth recognizing. Then there's another story from the Buddha. And this has to do with people who want things from you. So in the story of the Buddha's awakening, he's sitting under the Bodhi tree. And in the watches of the night, he has a series of realizations. There's a kind of a mythic, or if you will, a kind of a gloss on his own account. You could take it as true, or you could take it as metaphorical, either way. Sometimes good fiction is more true than a factual account. Anyway, there is the Buddha. And in the middle of his awakening process, in comes Mara, the trickster, the kind of the force of delusion, the confuser, the clowder, the convincer, the shapeshifter. And Mara comes in and starts trying to trick the Buddha. They start sending the Buddha pictures of beautiful, attractive others to draw him away through lust. He starts sending the Buddha images of horrible demons and adversaries to trick the Buddha with anger. The Buddha, recognizing what's happening, simply says, I see you, Mara. I recognize what you're doing. And then the Buddha, in the story, reaches down and touches the earth, grounds and claims his place. The Buddha does not fight with Mara, does not get complicated about it. The Buddha does not feed the trolls, as it were, of Mara. The Buddha simply says, I recognize you. I'm thinking of, because I'm a Lord of the Rings nut, Theoden, King Theoden, waking up from the spell cast by Wormtongue, his so-called advisor. And he gradually realizes he doesn't argue with Wormtongue. He just recognizes him as actually a very clever voice of evil, a voice of Saruman and sorrow. And it's the recognition of Wormtongue that sends him packing. So in much the same way, we have, in this example, one way to deal with people who want things from us or are pushing things on us, to claim for yourself the right to see clearly. And in any kind of an authoritarian regime, or in a wannabe authoritarian process, the fundamental effort, whether it's an authoritarian bully on a playground, or in a family, or a neighborhood, or a company, or a country, they want to trick you into believing things that are not true. And they want to undermine your confidence in your own capacity to see you wrong, to see clearly what is actually true. Now sometimes it takes time to recognize a repeated pattern and to be able to name it accurately. But to claim for yourself the right to recognize what's actually happening is absolutely crucial. And it's often lost in childhood. Children are often faced with a faithful choice. Do they think there's something wrong with you? Or with me? For many young children, it's very scary to recognize that which is wrong with their mom or their dad, or their caregivers, or the people with authority, including religious authority in their social settings, because, oh, if there's something wrong with y'all, you can't take care of me. But on the other hand, even though it's a scary choice, it's important to declare, at least as an adult, no, I'm okay, and there's something wrong here. You know, the exchanges are off. I get together with you, and we hang out, and you're using 80% of the words, and when I start talking about me, you start looking for the check from the waiter, because it's time to go. There's nothing wrong about that. When I walk away from interacting with you, I feel smaller, not larger, routinely. Something kind of wrong with that. I'll give you another kind of example. When I assert A, when I say A is real, or A is important, A is the topic I want to focus on, A is the result I'd like to get out of this relationship, or this situation, and they nod, like they hear you, and then they feed back to you B. They swerve away from A, because they don't really want to deal with A. They're interested in B. And then you kind of say, well, actually, it's A. You know, I'm interested in North. And they go, oh, yeah, totally, I'm into North, and West is really cool. And then they start talking about West, and it's like, huh. Around the third time that happens, you start recognizing a pattern. So claiming for oneself, the recognition, I see you, Mara. I see you, unfair exchanges. I see in a family, typically, in a heterosexual couple with children, much more often than not, the mother is on task many more hours a week than her partner is. Definitely, typically, the mother is doing more of the high-stress tasks in a family than her male partner is, and carrying more of the executive load, the planning, the worrying, the organizing, the executive function. These are research findings. And to the extent that maybe you're in a couple, or maybe you're, let's say, a man who just doesn't operate that way, well, no. For the average to be what it is, it means that there are other people who are even more extreme. So claiming for yourself the right to recognize that over time, to recognize injustice over time, is absolutely fundamental in that story. And then there's another story from the Buddha tradition. Basically, somebody comes to the Buddha and is kind of ranting at him and criticizing him and giving a lot of false accusations, you know, throwing mud, you that, you that, okay? I'll spare you that digression. So how did the Buddha respond? So the Buddha listened for a while and then said to that person, let me ask you a question. If you go to someone's home for a meal and they put on the table really terrible food, like horrible, smells bad, it's just wrong. It would make you sick to eat it. You bring your children, you bring your family to this event, and your family, your children, they would get sick. They would not do well. And if you were to be in that situation, would you refuse to eat the food? The person who comes at the Buddha says, well, certainly, I would refuse to eat that food. Oh, the Buddha says, and then if you would refuse to eat that food, who would have those poisons then? Who would have the tainted, not wholesome, not good stuff? And the person then said, well, of course, the other person would have that, you know, the person who started out with all that unwholesome food. And the Buddha said, exactly. In much the same way, I do not receive, I do not receive what you are giving me. I do not take it. And when I do not take it, it remains with you. That hostility, that falseness of mind, I'm kind of elaborating on the sutta, but I think legitimately, those weird agendas you're running, those remain with you. They're not mine. They're over there. Isn't that interesting? You know, and I think that there's a fundamental process in early childhood, very early childhood, in which the infant, you know, probably around six months, maybe a little before, can start to turn away. They have enough motor control. They look away, they turn their head, they turn away. And that's one of the most, that's one of the earliest volitional processes, to be able to say, no, no. Now then, various things happen. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a high chair at a family event with my very determined and motivated old school aunt, who I liked a lot, but still, Aunt Louise, she's shoving mashed potatoes or something into my mouth, and I'm going to turn one way to spoon to follow me, I turn the other way, I'm sitting in a high chair, I'm probably about two or three or four, or younger, whatever, but eventually she shoved it down my throat. So yeah, you can be overpowered, sure, over time, but there's a fundamental stand where you basically say, not mine, I don't, I, whatever, not mine. There's this, I'm not going to get sucked into that script again. I'm not going to play that role in the family setting. I'm going to step out of those routines, and you are going to be left with them. I'm not, the Buddha did not try to talk that other person out of his beliefs, there was some kind of a man who came at the Buddha then, he just said, I'm just not going to take it with me. And think how often in this life other people have views of us, or attitude about us, and we believe it. And it's very fundamental to go, well, not mine, I just am not going to take it. A funny film, quick story, is North Dallas 40, I'm dating myself, it's probably from the 70s, it kind of is a loosely disguised Dallas Cowboys football team, two major characters, one is a quarterback, throws the ball, the other is a receiver, catches the ball, that's all you need to know about American football, if you don't know much, anyway. And the receiver is an aging receiver and wants to get out of the game, wants to retire, has a big meeting toward the end of the movie, and says, no, I'm out of here, then goes downstairs, his quarterback buddy is going to play another season, expose his body to get more injuries, and his buddy quarterback somehow is trying to talk the main character, the receiver, into re-upping yet one more year, and then the quarterback is throwing a football in his hand, you know, playing with it, and he gets ready to throw the ball to the receiver. And this is something that they had done tens of thousands of times, it's so automatic. I've caught a lot of footballs, and thrown a lot of them too. So the quarterback throws the ball, and then essentially in slow motion, you see the receiver start to reach for the ball, and you know if he catches that ball, he's going to be sucked back into that script, and then he opens his hands out like that, the ball hits him on the chest, bounces off, he kind of smiles and walks away. And that's the end of the movie, he's disengaged from the familiar script that somebody was trying to suck him back into again. And then, another Buddha story, my last one, it's one of my absolute favorites, this comes from what are called the Jataka tales, these are stories that were developed after the Buddha died, and they're set in an age in which there's presumed rebirth. So this is a previous version of someone on the road to Buddhahood, who is incarnated in the body of a gorilla. And in that earlier time, animals could talk, non-human animals could talk, and they had lives of their own. So in this story, and I'll summarize it kind of quickly to get to the punchline. In this story, a human hunter wanders in the forest, gets lost, falls down into a deep hole and cannot get out. Starving, thirsty, he calls out and calls out, finally moved by compassion, the Buddha gorilla hears his cries for help and comes to help him. The gorilla looks down in the hole, the man says, get me out of here. The gorilla says, okay, I will, but I'm going to have to practice first. So the gorilla Buddha rolls big boulders down into the hole and then carries them up and out, practicing. Finally, with great effort, he is able to get the man up and out of the hole, pushes him on the other side, crawls out himself. Now the Buddha gorilla is lying there next to the man. So I'm going to warn you. I actually had somebody write me after I told this story. I'm just the messenger. It went, oh, I wish you had warned me. So there's a little warning here, but there's a happy ending. Here we go. So the man then says to the gorilla, the Buddha gorilla, okay, guide me out of the forest. The gorilla just says, okay, man, I will, but first I need to sleep. I need to rest. Gorilla falls asleep. The man starts looking at the gorilla thinking, I'm thirsty. I'm hungry. It's just a gorilla. He's just a stupid monkey. I think I'll pick up one of these boulders lying here and I'll just smash it down on the head of the gorilla and kill him. And then I'll, I'll drink his blood, eat his flesh and strengthened. I'll find my way out of this forest. So the man does it, reaches down, picks up a big heavy rock, smashes the head of the gorilla. But fear not, the gorilla is stunned, sits up, wakes up. What? What happened? The man realizes, wow, you know, I've got an angry gorilla here, maybe, but no, the Buddha gorilla orients to the man, sees clearly what's happened here. Blood streaming down the face of the gorilla and then tears start to descend on the face of the gorilla. As he looks at the man, shakes his head sadly and says, poor man, now you'll never be happy. And that's where the story ends. Now part of me, when I read that story, I wanted the Buddha to like really guilt trip the man or refuse to guide him out of the forest or take him back to his village and then tell everybody in the village what the man did. But the Jataka tale leaves that out because it's already complete. The Buddha looks at the man and knows that the man will inherit the results of his actions. And the Buddha feels sad for the man, not like, oh, I'm so glad you're going to never be happy, but more like, poor man, you've just done a terrible thing and you did it deliberately and the consequences of that terrible thing will follow you, poor man. And so we have here a story in which we realize that we don't always have to be the justice system ourselves. Now, yes, a lot of times people do get away with stuff. You know, apparently a significant fraction of murders are never solved. Wealth and power and privilege get away with a lot. And they have for 10,000 years. And still, there are limits to what we have to care about. There are limits to what we have to fix. Others have to deal with their own situations. We operate inside our circle. And this is where one of the key factors of healthy boundary setting is to know your own goodness. The Buddha Gorilla did not have to prove to the man that the Buddha Gorilla was virtuous. The Buddha Gorilla was already virtuous. You are already an innately good person. Think about the amount of time you might spend trying to prove yourself to others, convince others, impress others. I've had to grapple in my life with feeling like I always had to kind of prove myself today yet again. And gradually it's been a real blessing for me, I'm still working on it, to feel like enough, enough. I don't have to prove myself to you one more time. So for example, often it's hard for us to maintain boundaries because we fear that others will become disappointed in us or they won't keep us around. It's very helpful to really take a fresh look at a situation. Ask yourself a real question, okay, could I do better in the future? Maybe there's some minor incremental correction to put in because you're a learner, you've got a growth mindset, sure. But on the whole, probably much more often than not, you'll look at yourself and you'll think, dang, I'm definitely delivering the goods big time already. Good enough already. So that if they're disappointed in me, they're welcome to find another sucker. They're welcome to find another bottomless well of givingness. Good luck with that, you know. And again, being careful with pitfalls of arrogance and conceit and pitfalls of I'm so great, blah, blah, blah. No, it's more like just being grounded in reality, waking up from one of the three poisons of delusion, delusion about yourself that's overly negative and doesn't recognize your goodness enough already. And as we recognize that, we become more and more comfortable in a way that's deeply rooted in from the bottom up in setting appropriate boundaries. And I'll just finish with this, which is adjacent to the topic of boundaries, because boundaries are about differentiation. Okay, the distinction between this and that. Well, one of the poignant realities in life is that sometimes it's just simply the case that some portion of what we would like to receive from another person, from society, from our circumstances is just not coming. They will never give you the satisfaction of admitting that they were wrong when they were really wrong. That's not coming. Or a level of effort, I've talked about that previously, a work ethic or a sense of standards or caring at the level you care. It's just not coming. It's not going to come from that person or that type of person or those group of people. And it could be that you're in a family system in which others are simply not going to stand with you and witness the injustices that have been visited upon you by one person or another. They just are not going to do that. It's sad. You know, it's sad. It's real. And yet we have a choice. If it actually is reality that those kinds of supplies forms a good treatment, truth telling, witnessing, moral treatment is not going to come to you. When that's the fact and you can recognize, I see you, Mara. I see you, man, who's tried to kill me even though I just rescued you. I see you. When you recognize that fact, we have a choice. Do we keep trying to get blood from that stone? Do we keep trying to get the slot machine to pay off? Do we keep looking for cheese down that tunnel? Or do we allow ourselves to feel the sorrow and look for other wellsprings, look for fertile ground elsewhere, look for other sources of well-being, including ones that are much more under your own influence, maybe related to your own practice, your own contemplative practice, your own conduct, and where you rest your attention in the days that remain to you. And it's poignant, isn't it? And we can get very caught up in trying to get results that we do deserve, would be fair, but are just not going to come from certain sources. And we take a breath, and in the days that remain to us, given our own personal priorities and our duties to ourselves, our duties to our future self, we then start shifting, especially as we age. What might be those other wellsprings in your life? What might be other kinds of fertile ground for you, including just simply in your own privacy, your own attention? Sometimes your own company is better company than the company of other people. Without arrogance, without superiority, just being real. What feeds you and what drains you? What are your duties to yourself alongside duties to others? In that way, we can start doing a kind of boundary setting in which we shift out of trying to grow roses in a parking lot, and we start shifting toward growing the roses in our life elsewhere in fertile ground. We're making a distinction between the parking lot and the rich topsoil somewhere else. That's a kind of boundary. And I think, if nothing else, come back down into the rootedness of your own entitlement in a healthy way. You're here, much as the Buddha reached down and touched the earth and said, I'm going to paraphrase, hey, Mara, back off. I get to be here. I get to awaken. I see you. And I'm not interested in your program, Mara. I'm working my own because I have the right to do that innately. You have the right to make this life your own.